Faculty Profile: Dr. John H. Relethford

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recent activities of
Dr. Relethford and the rest of the
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list of corrections for the textbook Human
Population Genetics.

Dr. John H. Relethford
(Distinguished Teaching Professor) is a biological anthropologist who received
his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1980 from the State University of New York at
Albany. Prior to his current position at SUCO, he held the position of
Post-Doctoral Research Scientist with the Department of Genetics at the
Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. He also served as Manager of
Injury and Disability Surveillance in the Division of Epidemiology at the New
York State Department of Health. In addition, he has
served as an adjunct faculty in the Departments of Anthropology and
Epidemiology at SUNY at Albany and continues to hold an adjunct position in the
Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Dr. Relethford is a recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in
Teaching (1994-95), and was the inaugural winner of the SUNY-Oneonta Susan
Sutton Smith Prize for Academic Excellence in 1995. He was promoted to the rank
of Distinguished Teaching Professor, the highest rank in the State University
system, in 1998.

In addition to teaching
introductory biological anthropology, Dr. Relethford also teaches courses on
human variation, human evolution, and anthropological genetics. Dr. Relethford's major interests are in the fields of
anthropological genetics, human variation, and modern human origins. Much of
his research has focused on the reconstruction of history from patterns of
modern biological variation. His past work has also included studies of
migration, quantitative genetics, child growth, epidemiology, and aging. His
current work focuses on three topics: global patterns of craniometric
variation, the evolutionary history of Irish populations
and the origin of modern humans. These projects have been funded by grants from
the National Science Foundation (Ireland) and the SUNY Graduate Initiative
program (modern humans).

Dr. Relethford has over 170
publications, including several books, 82 peer-reviewed journal articles, and
19 book chapters. His introductory text, The
Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology (McGraw-Hill,
2013), is in its ninth edition. He has also written Genetics and the
Search for Modern Human Origins (John Wiley & Sons, 2001), and Reflections
of Our Past: How Human History is Revealed in Our Genes, which was
published in April 2003 (Westview Press), and awarded the 2004 W.W. Howells
Book Prize of the Biological Anthropology Section of the American
Anthropological Association. He has also written a textbook entitled Human
Population Genetics (2012), published by Wiley-Blackwell. He is
also a coauthor of the textbook Human
Biological Variation, now in
its second edition (Oxford University Press, 2011). Other significant
publications include "The use of quantitative traits in the study of human
population structure (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 1982, with F.C.
Lees)," "Detection of differential gene flow from patterns of
quantitative variation (Human Biology, 1990, with J. Blangero),"
"Craniometric variation, genetic theory, and modern human origins (American
Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1994, with H.C. Harpending),
"Anthropometric variation and the population history of Ireland" (American Journal of Physical
Anthropology, 1995, with M.H. Crawford), "Models and
predictions, and the fossil record of modern human origins" (Evolutionary Anthropology
8:7-10, 1999), “Boas and beyond: Migration and craniometric variation” (American Journal of Human Biology
16:379–386, 2004), “Global patterns of isolation by distance based on genetic
and morphological data” (Human Biology
76:449–513, 2004), “Genetic evidence and the modern human origins debate” (Heredity 100:555–563, 2008),“Geostatistics
and spatial analysis in biological anthropology” (American Journal of Physical Anthropology 136:1–10, 2008), and
"Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation" (American Journal of Physical
Anthropology 139:16-22, 2009).